Synopsis
Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte is a trenchant exposé of the frequently isolated, intellectually stagnant and emotionally starved conditions under which many governesses worked in the mid-nineteenth century.This is a deeply personal novel written from the author’s own experience and as such Agnes Grey has a power and poignancy which mark it out as a landmark work of literature dealing with the social and moral evolution of English society during the last century.
About the Author
Anne Brontė was for most of the twentieth century regarded as the least interesting of the Brontė sisters, both as a person and as a writer, Anne herself being characterised solely in terms of gentleness and meekness, and her two novels Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall seen as relying too greatly on a detailed realism in comparison with the excitements of Charlotte Brontė’s Jane Eyre and Emily Brontė’s Wuthering Heights. In the last thirty years, however, there has been a movement to revise both of these judgements, and Anne’s novels are beginning to find their rightful place in the Brontė canon. Anne was the last of the six Brontė children, born at Thornton in Yorkshire, on January 17, 1820, eighteen months after her closest sibling, Emily. In April 1820, the family moved to Haworth, where her father had a ‘perpetual curacy’. Her mother, Maria, died there of cancer in September 1821, when Anne was only a year and nine months. Thereafter the children were brought up by Patrick and by their mother’s sister, Aunt Branwell, who came to live with them, and to whom Anne was particularly close (they shared a bed). When Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte and Emily were all sent in 1824 to the unhealthy Cowan Bridge school for the daughters of clergy, Anne remained at home. Her older siblings Maria and Elizabeth both died of tuberculosis contracted at Cowan Bridge, Charlotte and Emily were brought home from the school, and the three girls, with their brother Branwell, were then all educated at home. During this period Charlotte and Branwell began their first excursions into the Glass Town/Angria fictions, until Charlotte’s departure in January, 1831 to go to school at Roe Head. Left together at home, Anne and Emily became much closer, wandering the moors freely, sometimes with Branwell. It was now that Emily and Anne drew on the Angrian precedent, beginning to create their own privately imagined world of Gondal (though none of these early Gondal manuscripts survive). It was out of this Gondal world that Anne’s poetry would eventually emerge.
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